Born in Hannover of Polish nationality, Grynszpan fled to Paris in 1936. On November 7, 1938, having learned of the deportation of his parents from Germany to Zbaszyn, on the Polish frontier, he shot the third secretary of the German embassy in Paris, Ernst vom Rath, as a protest, and promptly surrendered to the police. When the diplomat died two days later, the Nazis launched the "Kristallnacht" riots throughout the Reich. In 1940, the Vichy government turned Grynszpan over to the Germans. Two years later, the Nazi authorities planned a great show trial, orchestrated by Joseph Goebbels, hoping to demonstrate Grynszpan's link with a Jewish conspiracy to plunge Europe into war. Grynszpan himself seems to have sabotaged this scheme by reviving a story he had fabricated about a homosexual liaison between the diplomat and his assassin. His manner of death has never been clarified, but he almost certainly did not survive the war.
